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Show HN: I made a no-code tool to create animated technical papers

textframe.app

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Re: Show HN: I made a no-code tool to create animated technical papers

#51

Post by iandanforth »

Xevi wrote: post #45

Really cool, but the examples don't work well for me. One scroll step with my mouse on Windows is enough to scroll past some of the intermediary animations. A lot of information is lost because of that. I have to slowly drag the scrollbar with my mouse to view all animations. Another thing that has been pointed out is that this needs to degrade gracefully for PDFs and printed media.

"this needs to degrade gracefully for PDFs and printed media."

It does not. I can't remember the last time I printed out a tutorial video. Just because this media describes itself as 'animated technical papers' does not mean it should behave like dead-tree or static pdf technical papers any more than 'motion pictures' should behave like tintypes.

Re: Show HN: I made a no-code tool to create animated technical papers

#52

Post by iandanforth »

Please ignore all the comments where people are hung up on the 'technical papers' bit. This is great and you should be proud of what you've made. It is under no obligation to fulfill the expectations of a previous generation of media for one specific use case. I think a lot of people resort to slide decks to accomplish what you've built and IMO this is better.

Re: Show HN: I made a no-code tool to create animated technical papers

#53

Post by vultour »

nobrains wrote: post #25

Hi Rahul, here is some critique as a user / reader: - While I was reading (left column), the image (right column) changed but I did not catch it, since my focus was on the left column - Sometimes when I was reading and the image changed, I was not sure which part of the reading section the new image referred to. - Due to the 2 above things, I had to do a lot of left and right eye movements with every scroll of the mo…

There is an indicator left of the text showing you which part of the text the image should be referring to.

Re: Show HN: I made a no-code tool to create animated technical papers

#54

Post by Xevi »

iandanforth wrote: post #51
Xevi wrote: post #45

Really cool, but the examples don't work well for me. One scroll step with my mouse on Windows is enough to scroll past some of the intermediary animations. A lot of information is lost because of that. I have to slowly drag the scrollbar with my mouse to view all animations. Another thing that has been pointed out is that this needs to degrade gracefully for PDFs and printed media.

"this needs to degrade gracefully for PDFs and printed media." It does not . I can't remember the last time I printed out a tutorial video. Just because this media describes itself as 'animated technical papers' does not mean it should behave like dead-tree or static pdf technical papers any more than 'motion pictures' should behave like tintypes.

I guess it depends on your view of a technical paper. But I guess we can both at least agree that it would be useful to have graceful degradation, right? It allows for the ability to easily share it across multiple mediums.

Re: Show HN: I made a no-code tool to create animated technical papers

#55

Post by oolonthegreat »

nice idea but I think not knowing exactly when the animation will change is really a negative. it's fine if you are reading and scrolling slowly in a linear manner, but whenever you want to do other things like jump 3 sentences etc. it becomes confusing for me. I see that you put visual indicators on the left of the text whenever theres an animation,but maybe a better idea would be to put permanent indicators so the reader knows where are these animations are triggered.

Re: Show HN: I made a no-code tool to create animated technical papers

#58

Post by blowski »

cinntaile wrote: post #50
blowski wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in a company with a "no-print" policy, so that doesn't matter to me. I guess there is a question of how it works for, say, blind people but most of our diagrams already have that problem. If this makes the diagram easier to understand for a wider audience, then perhaps this actually helps accessibility.

What a weird policy? Why do they do this? Nothing beats paper for understanding something difficult for me, at that point technology is a distraction.

A lot of the documents contain highly sensitive data. There have been too many incidents of printed docs left on trains, thrown out in the rubbish, etc. That being said, you're not going to be use a third-party system like this to draw such diagrams. But there is definitely a use case for animated diagrams in such documents.

Re: Show HN: I made a no-code tool to create animated technical papers

#59

Post by cinntaile »

blowski wrote: post #58
cinntaile wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a weird policy? Why do they do this? Nothing beats paper for understanding something difficult for me, at that point technology is a distraction.

A lot of the documents contain highly sensitive data. There have been too many incidents of printed docs left on trains, thrown out in the rubbish, etc. That being said, you're not going to be use a third-party system like this to draw such diagrams. But there is definitely a use case for animated diagrams in such documents.

Ok that makes sense.

Re: Show HN: I made a no-code tool to create animated technical papers

#60

Post by vsarathy »

0des wrote: post #19
vsarathy wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had this HN id since 2012 and I can assure you that I am not the author of this post. I am related to Rahul though - he's my son.

Just wanted to interject an apology for the way this community member responded. For what it's worth, I think it's great that you're here in support of your son, and this project is really cool! You raised a good one!

Thank you! I sincerely appreciate your kind note.
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